UNITED NATIONS – In a verbal attack on America and Israel, Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, asserted yesterday his nation’s “inalienable right” to pursue technology described by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog chief, Mohammed el-Baradei, as a stone’s throw away from nuclear weaponry.

Iran’s defiant message at a Turtle Bay gathering of the signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was supported by some speakers at yesterday’s session. Most notably, Egypt echoed the argument that the true nuclear danger comes from Israel.

Iran “is determined to pursue all legal areas of nuclear technology, including enrichment, exclusively for peaceful purposes,” Mr. Kharrazi said. He insisted that, under NPT rules, Iran has the right to enrich uranium as long as it guarantees that it is for non-military use. Preventing Iran from doing so is a means for powerful nations to keep nuclear technologies for themselves, he said.

Secretary of State Rice urged Iran yesterday to return to diplomatic negotiations. Mr. Kharrazi’s speech, however, was not geared for compromise.

“It is unacceptable that some tend to limit the access to peaceful nuclear technology to an exclusive club of technologically advanced states,” he said in reference to the American and European efforts to limit his country’s nuclear capabilities. Those efforts should be directed at Israel instead, he added.

Because Israel has not signed the treaty, Mr. Kharrazi argued, it has amassed “one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons, which has endangered regional and global peace and security. “The Egyptian U.N. ambassador, Ahmed Fathalla, said that no peace can come to the Middle East until Israel joins the NPT as a “non-nuclear weapon state.”

Mr. Kharrazi’s rhetoric, according to European diplomats who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity yesterday, should be interpreted in light of a heated presidential election campaign in Iran. But, according to other Iran observers, the June election has little to do with the recent defiance by the mullah regime.

“The Iranian president has no real power, and he clearly does not determine nuclear policy,” the director of Israel Radio’s Farsi service, Menashe Amir, told The New York Sun. Instead, he argued, Tehran’s belligerence was a bargaining tactic. “According to a Farsi proverb, the real price of any merchandise is being determined when you argue and clash,” Mr. Amir said.

For the last two years, three major European powers, Germany, France, and Britain, have conducted diplomatic negotiations with Tehran. In them, Iran has promised to freeze all enrichment activity, the Europeans insist, and on Monday, the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, hinted that if that promise is not kept, negotiations might be dropped altogether.

Ms. Rice said yesterday that Iran should take full advantage of the European negotiating track. “There needs to be a very clear commitment from the Iranians to live up to their international obligations not to seek nuclear weapons,” she said.

Iran’s contention that the NPT rules allow it to enrich uranium is “specious,” the founding president of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, Paul Leventhal, told the Sun. Tehran calls America the Great Satan and threatens to wipe Israel off the map, he noted, adding, “You cannot trust a regime that wants to kill people, and is proud of saying it, with the means to develop nuclear weapons.”